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Intelligence in the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
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20008 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
5,174 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
The beauty and grandeur of European folk ballads often blind us to the intelligence that has gone into them. Collected and published by Bishop Percy, Francis James Child, and Cecil Sharp, with origins in oral, not literate cultures, the ballads often evince a dramatic sweep of action and call up powerful emotions that can obscure their intellectual content and structure, the artistry of the compose. It is so easy for us to think of intelligence as belonging only to a literate world, as showing itself only in written composition and in academic ways, that we can pass over the achievement of what we condescendingly call "untutored" intelligence.
The ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens" (or, sometimes, Spence) is surely one of the greatest--if not the greatest--of all the ballads. Coleridge refers to it as "that grand old ballad," Gerould says that "of itself [it would] have been enough to give [Percy's Reliques] its great place in English poetry," and Entwhistle calls it (and "Tam Lin") "unsurpassed in power and beauty throughout all Europe." Chambers says of the ballads in Child's collection,
They are of the first importance, not merely from their bulk, but from their literary quality, since they include most of those which, if the anthologists may be trusted, must be regarded as the best ballads. Here are, for example, such admirable things as "Sir Patrick Spens."
There is surprising unity among the scholars.
The testimony of those who have studied the ballads, the scholars, cannot be lightly disregarded, but, as Aquinas says, "the argument from authority is the weakest." A totally different kind of argument comes from the experience of hearing the balled--recited or sung--for it does not leave us unmoved. Hearing "Sir Patrick Spens" is a powerful experience--at least for me and for those I have witnessed. The overall effect of the singing or of the recitation is hard to describe, for the story has so many strands to it. There is the clearly majestic nature of the action, the sense of dealing with high matters, the pellucid nobility of Sir Patrick, the ominous warnings of disaster, the fulfillment of the omens, the cooperation--or is it a conspiracy--of nature, the totality of the victory, and the clear but unstated death of Sir Patrick. There is a sense of speed, of incredible compression, of a forceful economy, and, above all, of an urgent need to tell what happened--of so much being said and so much going unsaid, a sense of witnessing a mystery rite in which the pattern is clear but the meaning is
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